An Unnecessary Woman

You can find a lot of the basic elements of good writing in "An Unnecessary Woman." The voice of its main character, a former bookstore employee and sometime translator named Aaliyah, is believable and compelling, and the book takes the reader on a short tour of modern Lebanese history and describes how Beirutis have survived it, or not. The novel talks about how decades of conflict has affected both the city and the narrator's own life, and it provides both a lively description of neighborhood dynamics and a quieter, more sensitive take on one woman's intense loneliness. All of these things make "An Unnecessary Woman" a worthwhile read.

The problem with my book, as I see it, isn't its plot or its characters but the literary musings show more that run parallel to Aaliyah's narrative. It's not that her opinions or her choice of authors -- which runs to lesser known high-literary European types -- is objectionable. But I failed to see how the two halves of the book intersected with each other at all. I don't know how a Lebanese reader is likely to interpret, say, Fernando Pessoa, but, unfortunately, "An Unnecessary Woman" doesn't really let me know. Just about all of Aaliyah's observations -- and many of them are sharp -- could have just as well have come from some guy sitting in a café in Frankfurt or Oslo. While much of the book specifically concerns Aaliyah's life experience, her reading doesn't seem to have been at all influenced by the life she's lived.

One suspects that when she's discussing books Aaliyah mostly serves as a mouthpiece for the book's author, and the cultural alienation she feels might, in fact, be intentional, as Aaliyah mentions that literature often served as a refuge during the most difficult times of her life. But the sections in which she discusses books seem so walled-off from the rest of the novel. Aaliyah doesn't comment on anything here that wouldn't get high marks from a modern version of a fifties-era "I don't even own a television" American intellectual. There's a lot of classical music and literary fiction, but no Cairo pop, nothing in modern Arabic, no movies of an sort, no neighbors paying the radio, hardly any slang. The appearance of a young woman wearing a designer-brand t-shirt feels like some sort of tectonic shift. I realize that not everyone's cut out for poptimism, but the narrator doesn't even acknowledge these things to disparage them. She tells us how politics have affected her life, but, outside of her job at the bookstore, seems almost entirely ignorant of cultural politics -- what it means to be a reader and translator of Western literature in the Middle East. I wasn't able to suspend my disbelief, especially since the author works to give the book a strong sense of place in other ways. After all, Aaliyah has spent most of her life within the walls of her first and only apartment, which might almost be called a character in itself. You could make the crack that Alameddine could have called this novel "Translating Pessoa in Beirut," but, quite honestly, the book's central flaw is that it feels like Aaliyah could have been anyone translating Pessoa anywhere. This one's strong in some ways but not in others. show less

I don't usually operate in the realm of quarter-points, but this novel is better than a 4. Still, I'm not quite ready to say it's one of my favorite reads of the year (which would define a 4.5 or above). It's delightful and I will likely go purchase a copy so that I can read it again when I want to.

Aaliya, a divorced woman in her 70s, lives alone in her very nice flat in Beirut where she reads voraciously. She also dedicates each year to the careful translation of one work of literature into Arabic. No one is allowed to read these translations (no one even knows she does this work!) but the boxes containing her translations are carefully stowed away. As Aaliya's memories weave through the past several decades in her beloved city of show more Beirut, her efforts to define herself and her place in the world weave through the literature she has also loved. A testament to the power of literature to lend meaning to a life, this novel is also a testament to the power of human connection even while it validates the socially isolated path Aaliya has chosen.

There are some beautiful passages, one of my favorite being this.
"As someone living alone, as an aging woman, the technological discovery I love most is the electric clock, though with Beirut's electricity, I should say the battery-operated clock. Do you have any idea how much anxiety those old clocks induced? Ticktock, you're all alone in an empty apartment. Ticktock, the world outside is going to come and get you. Ticktock, you're not getting any younger, are you? Give me a tranquilizer, please.

The ticktock tattooing of the march of time.

The ticktock of the tiny object full of gears suffocating all existence, wringing life out of life.

After that wonderful discovery, the clock's hands still turned in the same direction -- it's called clockwise, for all you youngsters -- time still marched forward, but miraculously, its heartbeat, its ominous announcement, was reduced to a meek buzz."

Of course, there is also her wonderful commentary on her own unreliability:
"I'm not suggesting that I'm consciously dissembling. But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this:
When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma."

As I look over these passages that I marked, I believe they fall far short of capturing Aaliya's wonderful narrative voice. So I say just go get this book and read it. show less

“I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.”

“I slipped into art to escape life. I sneaked off into literature.”

“Someone shat in my home. I bought a Kalashnikov.”

“Joy is the anticipation of joy. Reading a fine book for the first time is as sumptuous as the first sip of orange juice that breaks the fast in Ramadan.”

“How does the old cliché go? When every Arab girl stood in line waiting for God to hand out the desperate-to-get-married gene, I must have been somewhere else, probably lost in a book.”

Aaliya Saleh is a widower, living alone in her Beirut apartment. She is mostly estranged from her family and show more finds solace in her endless stack of books. She also finds comfort and peace working in a bookstore and translating classic books, for her own pleasure. As she enters her seventies, she begins to muse about her life, her love of literature and the Lebanese Civil War that had rocked her beloved homeland.
This is a beautifully written novel. If the quotes I shared up there seem to be excessive- they are not. I could easily have added many more. I am a book geek after all. I am glad I finally got to this gem and if you have not, please correct that oversight. show less

Aaliya thinks she is An Unnecessary Woman. Certainly, in Beirut where women are valued by their connections to men, daughter, wife, or mother, she has no such connection. Her father died when she was young, her ex-husband was impotent and divorced her, and of course, she has no children. Now she is 72, years old and feeling her age. She has, though, a rich inner life, an internal conversation with books.

An Unnecessary Woman takes place of just a few days and not much happens at all, unless using far too much Bel Argent which turns her hair blue is something. Her big dilemma is choosing which book she will begin translating with the upcoming new year. She likes to begin her translations on New Year’s Day. She has a ritual, preparing show more her desk, her special pen, everything in its place.

But there is a lot happening internally. She recalls events in her life, the many wars, tracking down an AK-47 to defend herself, her friendships, the book she’s read. While her family relationship is fractious and her mother emotionally discarded her long ago, she had two people whom she considered real friends. Hannah, her not-quite sister-in-law and Ahmad, a young man who loved to read and helped in the bookstore where she worked before Black September turned him into a revolutionary. There are also the three women who also live in the four-plex apartment building with her. She calls them the Witches and eavesdrops on their conversations as they have their daily coffee. For over 50 years she listens to their lives without joining in.

Aaliya is a wit. If you can get through this book without a dozen or more snorts of laughter at some sly jab, you’re made of sterner stuff than me. Aaliya is opinionated about the books she has read and makes her own judgments. She has a keen intellect. Having lived through several wars, she notes that “at the heart of most antagonisms are irreconcilable similarities. Hundred-year wars were fought over whether Jesus was human in divine form or divine in human form. Belief is murderous.”

Where her judgment fails is in regard to herself. she thinks she is unnecessary, outside the main. She admits that she sought to be different, but regrets that she is so alone.

5-stars

So I absolutely loved An Unnecessary Woman. From beginning to end, I was entranced by the inner dialogue that filled Aaliya’s days. Her mind appeals to me. I love her sense of humor and her wry observations. I admire how with relatively little plot events, there can be such transformation and the realization that even at the age of 72, one can still change and grow, making different choices.



I loved the insight into a different worldview, that of a Muslim woman, though not a particularly devout one, in Lebanon with her skepticism of the United States and Israel, as well as of the various factions who struggle for power in Lebanon. As to her religious devotion, she remarks when covering her head with a scarf that she makes sure to show a bit of the skin on her neck. “I don’t want anyone to think I am covering up for asinine religious reasons.”

I loved the sense of place. Beirut was the other major character in An Unnecessary Woman and she had many conversations with her as she walked through the streets and alleyways. Aaliya loves Beirut, but its an exasperated love. “Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, tacky, falling apart, aging, and forever drama-laden. She’ll also marry any infatuated suitor who promises to make her life more comfortable, no matter how inappropriate.”

This is a wonderful book, one that makes you want to highlight all the clever and insightful bits, the striking use of language such as a stovetop flame “livid and blue”, but if you do, you will have a book with more highlighted than untouched. It is that thick and rich with words you will want to remember

★★★★★

http://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2016/12/22/isbn9780802122940/ show less

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: One of Beirut’s most celebrated voices, Rabih Alameddine follows his international bestseller, The Hakawati, with a heartrending novel that celebrates the singular life of an obsessive introvert, revealing Beirut’s beauties and horrors along the way.

Aaliya Sohbi lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, divorced, and childless, Aaliya is her family’s "unnecessary appendage.” Every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The thirty-seven books that Aaliya has translated have never been read—by anyone. After overhearing her neighbors, "the three witches,” discussing her too-white hair, Aaliya show more accidentally dyes her hair too blue.

In this breathtaking portrait of a reclusive woman’s late-life crisis, readers follow Aaliya’s digressive mind as it ricochets across visions of past and present Beirut. Insightful musings on literature, philosophy, and art are invaded by memories of the Lebanese Civil War and Aaliya’s volatile past. As she tries to overcome her aging body and spontaneous emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left.

A love letter to literature and its power to define who we are, the gifted Rabih Alameddine has given us a nuanced rendering of a single woman's reclusive life in the Middle East.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt is to discuss your favorite novel in translation. So far this year, this is my hands-down favorite novel translated from the furrin. **CORRECTION** The novel was written in English, but it's so beautiful I don't want to take it down!

What does it mean to be invisible? If you choose not to interact with the world, become a recluse, divest yourself of close relationships and divorce yourself from the life of the boudoir, and seal yourself away in a capsule formed of books and words, you are a freak. Aaliya's neighbors think she's a ruined woman. Aaliya's customers at the bookstore she works at, intellectuals all, don't notice her enough to form an opinion, and her family (absent the dearest companion of her life, her *true* family, a departed friend) hasn't given her much attention at all.

She lives in Beirut, that once-fabulous once-gorgeous ruin on the Mediterranean, an early victim of the endless idiotic religious wars of the region. Aaliya represents Beirut's decline from a world-class cultural center to a shuttered mass of broken buildings holding wary, angry people.

Aaliya is an angry woman, or at least I see her as such, and has walled herself in to avoid the nasty consequences of being angry amid armed and angry men. She would not be isolated if Beirut wasn't what it is, I think, because she is a reflection of the energy of that wounded and dying place. She preserves her sanity by translating her beloved books, the beauties of which she renders into the sinuous sonorous rhythms of Arabic. And then, like she does with her self, she packages them up and puts them away. They are safe. They are invisible.

This is tragic. This is a sin. A woman, a mere woman, cannot be her full self; a book, a useless object, cannot spread its beauties for fear that it will not be appreciated or will be used as a weapon by the religious idiots.

And this is the reason I give this book over four stars. Alameddine has created a literary person's most deeply felt example of why the world appears to be headed directly for the bottom of the septic tank: Aaliya reads and thinks on and renders the majesty and magic of words into the language of her people, and then cannot, will not, dare not allow them out of her keeping.

This book should have made me feel claustrophobic. It appears to be a scream from within the coffin that anti-intellectual religious idiots are all but nailing shut around the world. (Creation SCIENCE?! REALLY?!) Instead I felt...uplifted in a curious way, heartened, encouraged. Alameddine sees it too! He created this most marginal of marginal beings, the unmarried childless woman intellectual in an Islamic society, and set her to singing. Aaliya sings her thoughts, sings her translations, warbles her precious quotes to herself, her best and only audience. She makes beauty from beauty as she sits and rots in the cesspool of gawd.

I don't know if this is a cautionary tale, an elegy, or the queitest jeremiad of all time. I do know that I can't, and don't wish to, forget Aaliya.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less

Aaliya is a 72-year-old woman living alone in a Beirut apartment surrounded by books and memories. Estranged from her family, divorced from her impotent husband, and retired from her bookstore, Aaliya is friends with solitude. Every New Year's Day she begins translating a new book, and every year end, she boxes up the translation and stores it in her back room. But Aaliya isn't lonely. She has deep and rich relationships with literature and music that have been her companions throughout her life. Drily humorous and ironic, Aaliya is so well-drawn and lifelike, I feel like I could walk into a Lebanese bookstore and find her reading behind the desk.

An Unnecessary Woman is a book for readers. Almost every page has a reference to an author, show more book, or composer that sent me Googling down rabbit holes and adding dozens of books to my wish list. Yet, it's not at all pretentious. Aaliya isn't name dropping, she's talking about friends. Whether discussing the art of translation or her process for choosing which book to read next, Aaliya is a kindred spirit for booklovers.

The book is also a depiction of life during the decades-long Lebanese Civil War and an exploration of aging and what it means to live a meaningful life. It's a book that I could reread with pleasure because there are so many layers and the ending is perfect. I'm looking forward to reading more by Alameddine, because if this book is any indication, he could become a favorite author. show less

Wonderful soul-searching of an aging and spirited female first-person narrator who has never fit into Lebanese society, who lives mostly alone and has dedicated her life to literature, classical music, and translating books into Arabic--all in her own way. I loved it from the beginning, but when she was setting up to start a new translation and commented that Pearl erasers are the best, no question, I knew for certain that I was at home.

The quotes from her lifetime of reading and her opinions on everything can touch one's soul if they aren't making one laugh. She has lived through the destruction of what Beirut once was, faced trauma, but is able to distance it somewhat from herself (at least at times) through writing this show more memoir.

Although I knew that this female narrative was written by a male author, I found the viewpoint so convincing that my mind remembers it as a woman's writing.

I would be surprised, however, if the book appeals to young readers. show less